In November 1963, nearly six years before man went to the moon and just eight days before President Kennedy made his fateful drive through downtown Dallas, The Dallas Morning News published a spread of Thanksgiving cranberry recipes in which Julie Benell, the paper’s food editor at the time, dubbed the cranberry the “American aristocrat.”
There were recipes for cranberry ice cream, cranberry milk ice, cranberry Bavarian cream, cranberry whipped topping, cranberry chiffon pie and hot buttered cranberry punch. Hot buttered cranberry punch? Intriguing. I decided to give this recipe a try and see if it’s one that should be resurrected on holiday tables or politely left behind in 1963.
Unlike other cranberry punch recipes that call for cranberry juice or cranberry juice cocktail, this recipe uses two full cans of jellied cranberry sauce (whoa) that are blended with water, a spiced brown sugar simple syrup and pineapple juice. I don’t know how many grams of sugar that is, but I know it’s somewhere between a lot and too much.
The punch is served hot and finished off with a pat of butter. Yes, that’s right, butter. Think buttered rum but without the alcohol and with the butter melted on top instead of blended in. You could easily add alcohol to this recipe, though.
Just a half mug of this punch made my teeth feel like they might fall out from the sweetness, but I’d probably make this again, if only to perfume my kitchen with the spiced brown sugar syrup. If I were to make it again, I’d maybe swap out one of the cans of jellied cranberry for cranberry juice and add a few squeezes of fresh lemon juice to brighten things up.